


A Time Of Hope Through The Land

by Silikat



Category: Frühlings Erwachen | Spring Awakening - Frank Wedekind, Spring Awakening - Sheik/Sater
Genre: (Well mostly at least), Bittersweet, Canon Compliant, Canon Era, Eventual Happy Ending, Gen, Post-Canon, The Things I Write Out Of Nowhere At Midnight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-26
Updated: 2017-05-26
Packaged: 2018-11-05 08:13:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11009469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silikat/pseuds/Silikat
Summary: There were children in a village, and when the winter came and darkness fell, two of them fell with it. But spring returned for the survivors, and many more to follow, leading them through the time after the sadness.This is not what happened, after. Nobody knows that but the children, who grew and lived and died all the same. But this might have been what happened, one possibility of thousands, an uncertain story. Of children who became adults, who once sang of frustration and fear. Of the spring that might have come.





	A Time Of Hope Through The Land

**Author's Note:**

> See the end notes for more rambling about What This Is And How It Came To Be.
> 
> Warnings for: canon-typical triggers such as rape, suicide, sexual assault, teen pregnancy, alcohol and drugs use - none of these are any more graphic than they are in canon, but it's worth noting.

Melchior Gabor leaves. He isn’t sure what happened, in the time between. It is all a blur, all action and no emotion attached. It is as though he fell asleep, and woke to find himself older, studying at university with a job in a shop, living in a little room that he rents with all the money he has.

Sometimes he thinks of writing to his mother; every time, he stops before he can put the address on the envelope. There is a part of him that wants to forget, to detach himself from all that happened, from all that he did. But there is no running away from who he is.

They didn’t teach him. That is what he tells himself. They didn’t teach him about any of these things, and so he had to learn them for himself. But there were gaps in his education – nobody to tell him the word ‘consent’, to learn when someone is saying no, not just out of fear but genuinely not wanting.

That is what he tells himself, but the more time passes and the older he grows, the more he realises that it was not the case. Not fully. Because he was fourteen, still a child but old enough to know, old enough to understand. His may not have been the hand that killed Wendla Bergmann but he planted the seed that led to her destruction – he was culpable, as much as anyone could be.

And they had all been so young, back then. They had so far to go.

Two short lives, stopped before they could become who they were meant to be, the potential in them bright as a midsummer day, but it was winter time when they died. And his shadow was cast over their graves. Melchior doesn’t think that he will ever forgive himself for what he did, and what he did not do.

Moritz was the first. Moritz, his kind-hearted and anxious friend. The friend who he was failed, whose thoughts he was blind to until the very end. Could he have said anything, done anything to avert the boy from his path? He could have been there, could have been so much more to him than he was. He could have been there that night, that cold night he was found, his body stiff in the snow, a gun shining in his hand, the whole world white apart from a small splash of red. If he was there, he could at least have tried.

And then there was Wendla, and that was his fault. He was too eager, too brash, too caught up in his own desires to hear the girl who he was projecting them onto. He was to blame, and there was no way that he could convince himself otherwise. It was hard for him to imagine; her lying cold and dead in the ground, when before she had been so full of light and life.

Their memories follow him, their ghosts walking in his footsteps, no matter where he goes. He does not write to his mother. He does not contact anyone. He works in a shop. He studies hard. He sleeps every night on a stiff mattress in a small room. He tells himself that he is going to be better. He tells himself that he has changed. He tells himself that it will not happen again.

He tells himself many things. Who knows if they are true, or just pretty words to dance on the wind before him.

But Melchior Gabor carries on. What else can he do?

~

Martha Bessell stays where she is, at least at first. She tries to grow up on the path that her parents have set for her, because that is what good girls do. But one night a boy she shouldn’t have been talking to asks her a question that she has been told never to say no to, and the night grows a little darker around them.

It is two months later that she realises that she has not bled since, and her heart skips a beat. She can’t tell her parents, not while there is a chance that the thing she knows is growing in her belly was not fathered by the boy she met once. And she remembers, another time, the same place. A girl who now lies rotting beneath the ground, a mother all in black since. She can’t tell. And so she gathers up all she owns and a little out of her father’s wallet, and she runs.

She doesn’t know where she’s going, not at first, but she is lucky. She finds a kind stranger who will take her away in his cart for a few pennies, and though she is growing to mistrust the kindness of strangers, this man lets her sit silent behind him until she feels it is time to stop travelling. She finds herself in another village just like the one she left behind, and there she pauses, because she knows what folk would think of a young woman with a baby at her knee and no husband at her side. She knows what her mother used to say of women like that, back in the old days. Glad that her belly has not yet grown large, she carries on to a city, where she can be anonymous and her tales of a fiancé that was killed, that she left in a grave in a little village, hold no suspicion.

The child is born, and she calls it Wendla. She gives birth to it on her own, in the room that she rents with the little money she can scrape together. As she pushes and strains and cries, she remembers her mother talking about the miracle of childbirth, and how beautiful and heavenly it was. Not this, lying in the darkness with her belly on fire, a doll-like body coming out of her own. But after what feels like a lifetime, it is over, and she holds the squirming child against her chest, mother and child covered in blood and crying and alive.

Five minutes old, and Martha lies her child out in a blanket and signs to her all the secrets that she was never told by her parents. She makes her a promise, as the child clenches her tiny fists and blinks up at Martha, purple and red and somehow still beautiful. Martha promises her daughter that she will tell her everything, no matter what comes. She would watch her girl as she grew, and not let any man near her that the girl didn’t want there. She would teach her as best she could, and raise her to be happy, and alive, and free. To be everything she was not allowed to be.

Martha holds her child close. She does not know how she is going to live, what hardships the future will hold. But she can feet her daughter’s heart beat next to hers, and that is enough. She has faced so much already. She can survive. She has to.

~

Hans Rilow grows up, as many young men do. Hans Rilow grows up, and he begins to forget. He moves away from his home, out to university where his bright mind can grow, where he can follow his father into a good profession and make a life for himself. And he is the model pupil, in his parents’ eyes. He studies, and gets good grades, and soon finds himself propelled into a job that he hates, but gives him enough money to live the way he wants to.

The impression he gives his parents may even be true. He has mellowed with age, blushes when he thinks back on the embarrassing days of his youth. Though he still holds a fondness for it in his heart, he has rewritten his past over and over in his mind, thinking on what he would have done differently, if he could do it all again. He aches to do it all again, to be that youth once more, young and not knowing of what was to come, of a winter that left loss in its wake for everyone he knew.

He writes letters to Ernst every second weekend. There is a painting of a vineyard hanging above his bed. He does not marry, though his mother asks in every letter when she is going to get some grandchildren. He always deflects her questions, replies that nobody has yet caught his eye.

The truth is complicated, and messy. Many have caught his eye, but they are not the sweet young girls his mother wishes for him. There are men; plenty of men. Their hands are in Hanschen’s hair, their lips on his as he gasps into their mouths, tasting of sweat and spit and old tobacco, their soft words in his ear. Liaisons in secret places, an underground open to Hanschen. Someone he met at university told him where to go, who to ask for. He is discreet, but anxious to explore. He knows there is danger, but he carries on looking. He is searching for something, and in his heart he knows where it is.

His letters to Ernst are jovial, full of sarcastic humour and friendly insults. He imagines Ernst sitting at some writing-desk and reading them, the room lit only with a candle’s glow. He imagines Ernst’s face, soft and smiling as his eyes scan the words. And then he stops imagining, because his hands have begun to shake and he has dropped a blot of ink onto the paper. Careless, he tells himself. In his position, he cannot afford to be careless.

He is a good son. His parents are proud of the life that he has made. He does his duty, no matter what. Though his soul might be empty and he longs for more, he does what he is supposed to.

So when a man is shot in another country, a shot that is heard through all of Europe, Hans Rilow knows where his destiny lies.

~

Ilse Neumann disappears.

She leaves Priapia one night and is not seen there again. Those who are still there do not seem to care much for her leaving. Not enough to look for her, anyway.

The folk in the village assume the worst, as village folk tend to do of a young girl who ran away to join an artist’s colony. They assume that she is lying in a forest, wasting away with flowers in her hair while her mind is rocked by the bottle, or worse. They assume that she never left Priapia at all, that she is still there and locked in a room somewhere, buried beneath the floorboards or under the flowers that the artists draw sometimes. They assume that she is gone, and not their problem anymore. A dirty little secret confined only to memory. Another wayward daughter, gone and soon forgotten.

But Ilse is not dead, just escaping. She feels as though she has been running for years when she chances across a travelling group of actors, her clothes torn and ragged, her breath coming from gaunt cheeks. Their horse races past her as she stumbled up to the road, and one of them sees her lone figure struggling to take her next step. They take pity on her and give her a good meal, and she is ready to run once more when one of them catches her arm and invites her to stay. She could look after their costumes for them, he suggests. It isn’t much, but they’ll feed her, and she can travel.

He is holding her arm, and her eyes do not see him. She sees another man, one with a gun, laughing as he touches it to her chest. She sees men with paintbrushes who want to do more than just paint her, who grab her and touch her and stroke her and do as they will with her. She sees it all, and she shrinks back, not sure of this stranger who let her sit by their fire and eat their food. Nothing comes for free, she learned that lesson a long time ago. She always pays a price.

And still, she says yes.

There is danger, with the actors, but they are not a bad group. They protect their own, she finds out one night in a secluded room when her cheeks are flushed with wine and her walls lowered. One of the actors sees her through the open door, sees her and the two men that crowd her, and steps through the door to take her to their camp. In the morning, she wakes and remembers, and freezes as she sees his silhouette before her, because her mind is telling her that he wants something in return. That has always been the way, as long as she remembers. But he just smiles, and hands her a plate.

Ilse is there for years, in the end. Among the actors she now counts as her friends, travelling the country and performing for anyone who will pay. She performs a little, because she likes wearing the costumes and pretending to be somebody else. When she closes her eyes, she is a child again, running about on the grass and playing pirates. It isn’t perfect, but it is a life. A little money in her pocket, a full belly, company to laugh with and a roof over her head. What more could she want?

And then one day she finds herself in a pub, where the actors are buying more and more drinks from a lone barman. In a corner, a woman with a baby strapped to her back sweeps the floor. She glances up, and meets Ilse’s eyes, just for a second. But a second is all she needs to recognise the face of Martha, and for her to recognise Ilse, too. She drops the broom, and it clatters to the floor. Ilse stands, a lump in her throat. And then they are hugging, and signing each other’s names, and crying, and laughing.

They stay up all that night, just being together. Martha looks so much like the girl she left behind, but there is a strength to her face now, a determination in her eyes. She is stronger, a girl forged into a woman through fire and hardship. Ilse wonders how she looks, to Martha.

Martha mentions that she is alone, just her and the baby. Little Wendla, with her curl of black hair and her thumb in her mouth. Ilse looks from the child to the woman, and knows what is in her heart.

Ilse stays. An impulsive decision, but she knows that she will regret every day if she does not. She bids goodbye to the actors, thanks them for the thousandth time for finding her that night. She sleeps on the floor in the room that Martha is renting. She looks for work, living off little so that there can always be food and warmth for the baby. And little by little, their lot improves. They rent a bigger room, with two beds that are easily pushed together to become one, and a cot in the corner. Hand in hand, they forge their way towards the future. They will do better, they promise each other. They will be more.

~

Ernst Robel does not remember who first told him that Hanschen was going to war. A friend of a friend of a relative, who mentions it in passing. It has been years, a little over twenty of them, since he last set eyes on him. When Ernst sends a frantic letter to him, nearly begging him to deny the rumour, Hanschen’s reply comes with a photograph. It is small and slightly crinkled from the journey, of Hanschen dressed in his uniform, kit bag slung over his back. Ernst holds the photograph in front of him. He can barely see the face of the Hanschen that he grew up with underneath the wooden smile of this grown man. But then, they are both different people to who they were then.

He is a pastor, of a village not far from where he was born. He lives in a vicarage beside the little church, where every day the bells chime the hour. Sometimes people see him sitting in his garden, eyes closed, thinking as the bells ring out across the village. The villagers think that there is nobody who understand why Pastor Robel does what he does, but they are wrong. There is one man that could tell them, but he is among the mud and fire of the trenches now, and cannot be asked.

Ernst’s days are full of prayer and waiting. He preaches his sermons, takes walks through the countryside, visits the homes of the mothers with sons caught in the fighting, wives whose husbands have left them all alone. Then he returns each night to the little vicarage beside the old church, and sits alone in the darkness of what he supposes is his home.

He prays then, too. But every time the name of the Lord is signed, he is thinking of something else entirely. A winter’s evening, two youths sitting together in a vineyard. A sin, he thinks, with nobody to confess to but himself.

It has only been twenty years, but he still looks back, though he tells himself he will not. It may have been winter, but he remembers that night in all the golden hues of summer. How they held each other, how they kissed. How Hanschen’s boyhood arrogance melted away under Ernst’s hands. And for a moment, he is content.

More letters come. His life is lived in letters. From his parents, from people he knows and does not care about. One from Hanschen’s mother, short and polite, telling him that they have had no word of their son since he left. One from Ilse, strangely. Apparently she found out where he lived now, apparently she is still alive. He grasps at the connection to his home, ends up telling her more than he should. He mails the letter before he has the chance to change his mind.

She tells him much in return. She is living with Martha – they have raised a child, a girl named Wendla. She is the same age they were, that winter. So much time has passed. He writes her back as soon as his has finished reading the letter, and so it continues. Slowly, he begins to hear from the others, the people he knew and grew apart from. But not Hanschen. Hanschen is still lost to them.

Four years have now passed since he heard a rumour, and Ernst is carrying on. The war is over and lost, over and gone, and the soldiers that survived are limping home.

He does not think about it, though many pass through his village on their way back to where their homes. He does not think about it, that is the story that he tells himself. He does not take the photo from his pocket where it has sat for four long years, crumpled and slightly torn, and stare into the face of a young man who did not know what this war would be when he set out to fight.

Then one day, he does. He is giving one of the soldiers tea, as he often does. Tea and sandwiches made by his housekeeper, while he talks to the soldier. The stories that the man is telling him, a glassy look in his eye, are of starvation and fire and terror all around, and they chill Ernst to his bone. He thinks of a boy with hair the colour of the summer sun, remembers the warmth of him in his arms, and takes the photo from his pocket. The soldier takes it, and he frowns to look at the smiling face of Hanschen.

 _Do you know him?_ Ernst finds himself signing, his hands moving without him bidding them to. _Have you seen him, at all? His name is Hans, Hans Rilow._

But the soldier just shakes his head, and hands the photo back.

Again and again, the ritual is repeated. Again and again, he is met with negatives. None of the war-weary who stumble through his sleepy village have heard the name of Hans Rilow. So Ernst sits in his garden and closes his eyes, and listens to the church bells, and tries to think of nothing.

He opens his eyes to see another man dressed in army uniform coming down the path, his kit bag slung over his shoulder. He is silhouetted against the late evening sun, and Ernst cannot make out his face. He stands automatically. The soldier must have been sent from the village, his spare room a fair place to spend the night for the weary traveller. He arranges his face into the guise of Pastor Robel, and tries to forget the years that came before the title.

The soldier is a few feet away, and Ernst cannot quite see him. His jaw moves in silhouette – he has said something, but Ernst cannot read his lips, cannot guess what he has said. And then he draws closer, and all becomes clear.

Ernst looks up into the scarred face of a man with hair the colour of the summer sun and eyes that shine just as bright, and though his mouth is open his hands have fallen, still, to his sides. The soldier stops walking in front of him, drops his bag to the ground, and stands still, almost at attention.

 _I should have tried to find you earlier_ , says Hanschen Rilow, then he smiles and signs it. And before he knows what he is doing, Ernst has wrapped his arms around the man who was the boy he had loved, his cheeks wet with tears. He looks up into Hanschen’s face, and smiles as Hanschen puts a finger to Ernst’s lips.

Inside, behind the drawn curtains, they kiss like they were still schoolboys hiding in a vineyard, like no time at all has passed since that moment. There will be time for talking, later. Now they have each other, and now they are holding on to all they have.

~

And Wendla and Moritz do not change, as is common among their kind. Their bodies change; their skin blackens and grows cold, under the earth and stone where they lie. But the echoes that still linger that once were called Wendla Bergmann and Moritz Stiefel do not change, for theirs is just to watch.

They do not know why their consciousness still remains on this world, when they should have gone on to another place. That was what they were told; that must be so. But time ticks on and they remain in the graveyard, sitting on the stones that bear their names, looking the way they did when they were fourteen years old.

Sometimes they talk. Hands move with nobody to see them but each other, signs unseen by any living person, at last private and away from the world. Here they can say all that they needed to say, when they were alive, but could not when they were kept silent by the people that surrounded them. Their hands were once tied at the wrist, not given the signs to express what they needed, but now they can sign how they want to, make up signs when they don’t know the right ones.

They cry, a little, at first. Moritz thinks that he is to be alone for what feels like a long time. There are no angels, no people he can talk to. He watches as his body is put into the ground with a strange numbness inside. He can’t feel anything, not anymore. Not sadness, not happiness, not anger, nothing.

Then Wendla appears, her arms wrapped around herself, her face the picture of confused agony. She died screaming, she tells him, surrounded by strangers in a dark room, and she didn’t understand. Her hands kept touching her stomach – she was pregnant, she tells him. With Melchior’s baby. They say nothing about that, not for a while.

Gradually, months later, they gather the courage to leave the edges of the graveyard. They stand among the people that once were their friends, their families, and watch as they drift away. Everyone they knew is growing older, while they stay the same. Eternal, young, and intangible, they sit on a wall together and watch the people go by,

Wendla finds Ilse, one day, wandering far from anywhere with a bottle in one hand, a small basket of food in the other. She walks beside her, invisible, her feet making no mark on the grass beneath them. Slowly, acting on an impulse, she takes Ilse’s hands, and begins to guide her. Out of the countryside, out of the woods, towards a path that Wendla knows leads to somewhere safe. Ilse’s eyes are glazed, her mind far away. She doesn’t seem to register the ghostly presence that leads her to another road, another way to escape.

After what seems like a lifetime, Wendla sees the familiar light of Moritz on the road out of the village. He has a horse’s reigns in one hand, and is followed by a group of running, shouting people. There is a faint grin on his lips as he lets the horse run past her and Ilse, and the people follow. As they pass Ilse, one of them stops, face crinkling into a frown. Wendla looks across at Moritz, who shrugs, now smiling properly. She doesn’t ask an explanation. Moritz told her what happened, the night he died. He smiles a little more often after that.

They do the same thing when Martha runs. They had been watching her for a while, growing more and more concerned about their old friend. Wendla aches to tell her not to worry, that she is watching over her. That she will make sure that Martha and her baby live. But they don’t follow her when she leaves for the city – they can’t, they know that much about their nature. They have to stay, and pray for their friend.

Eventually, the only ones left in their home are the adults who failed them. The kids that had been their friends grow up and go on their way, either silently in the night like Martha and Ilse, or in the way they were meant to like Hanschen and Georg. Their parents stay behind. Wendla’s mother has not stopped wearing black and weeps when she thinks nobody is watching. Moritz’s father refuses to speak his name. Frau Gabor seems just like them – just a ghost, floating through her life as though she could not touch anything.

There are always flowers at their graves. Wendla and Moritz decide that they like that.

Time passes, as time always does. They hear through the grapevine what has become of the others. Wendla cries when she hears of Martha’s child’s name. Moritz smiles at a letter read over Frau Rilow’s shoulder that tells how Hanschen moved to the village Ernst is pastor of. Letters that are left overnight on tables and desks are free for them to pore over, discuss the news hidden within. It is their joy, other than the time they spend with each other. Two ghosts, running around on the grass outside their home, playing pirates as though they were children again.

They hear little of Melchior. Neither of them wants to speak of him, much. Sometimes in the nights, when the shadows are long and both minds are turned back to the day that the boy uncovered their graves and held a razor to his throat.

It is one summer, years since their deaths, that Moritz notices that the sun shines through his transparent form more than it had ever before. They are not afraid, for they no longer fear what lies beyond the bounds of death. Wendla holds his hands as he disappears, little by little, on to what happens after. Neither knows why now; neither wishes to speculate. They cannot stay forever, half-living and half-dead. So both are smiling, when Moritz fades away completely.

Mortiz’s last thought on this earth is this: _At last, I can be an angel at last_.

Wendla is not alone for long. She is fading too, and she takes the opportunity to visit her mother for one last time. _How old she looks_ , Wendla thinks, _how old and how sad_. Her hand brushes against her mother’s face, and the old woman looks up, and for a second it is as if she can see Wendla standing there. Then the illusion is gone, and her head drops once more.

The girl who did not grow old smiles, her transparent hands moving one last time, a sign that nobody sees but her. Then she is gone, and all that is left is a line carved into stone. Gone, but not completely. Gone, but the memory of her lingers in the lives that she touched, and that is enough.

~

They were children, but most children grow. When the spring returned to the place where they lived, they found that their lives were still there, amid the grief and pain that had come before. Two were gone, but the rest remained, and had to figure out who they wanted to be, where they wanted to go.

In the end, they were happy. Each found their happiness through a life of weeping, a childhood spent mourning the innocence that was to leave them. But still, they survived, and they carried on to become more than they had been, better than they were. When all is said and done, they could not have hoped for more.

**Author's Note:**

> I...don't know why I wrote this. It just came into my head the other night when I was listening to the soundtrack. In my head, it's sort of a mix of the characters from the original play and the musicals, both the original and Deaf West productions. I'm sure there are things that I missed, given that I've barely been into this show for a few months now, but this is what I wanted to write. I wanted to give these kids an ending, perhaps not the best ending that they could have gotten, but an ending where they can escape, and be happy, and break the cycles of abuse and misinformation that they were caught in.
> 
> Criticism is welcomed, and don't be afraid to leave a comment no matter what you thought of the fic.


End file.
